The 2009 William H. Flanigan Award for Distinguished Service as an ICPSR Official Representative was presented to Diane Geraci, Associate Director for Information Resources at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries. Diane is a long time IASSIST supporter and former Admin Committee member.

Congratulations, Diane!

At the same ceremony, friends of IASSIST Merrill Shanks and Steven Ruggles were each presented the 2009 Warren E. Miller Award for Meritorious Service to the Social Sciences.

The Digital Life Cycle was mentioned many times during the IASSIST 2006 conference. Reaction toward this concept was varied. Some were unsure they liked this idea claiming that the life cycle was a confusing or imperfect metaphor. Others applied a very exact meaning to the concept associating it to the stages through which information passes within a system or large process. The Session that I chaired on Institutional Repositories and Social Science Data: Supporting the Data Life Cycle (B1) provided different visual representations of the digital life cycle. more...

Interesting report applying the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model and the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) to the UK Data Archive; a very useful convergence of preservation strategies and articulation of what the model means for data and disciplinary focused digital repositories/archives.Email from the Digital Preservation Department at the UK National Archives:

In conjunction with the UK Data Archive, The National Archives have released a report comparing their preservation practices to the leading internationally recognised standard for digital archives. This provides a model for other organisations to test the compliance of their own systems.

Using the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model the two organisations were able to compare their preservation practices within a common framework: an opportunity that was particularly timely because, in January 2005, the UKDA was appointed as a legal place of deposit for National Archive documents.

The OAIS reference model (ISO 14721) is the major international standard addressing the structure and operations of digital archive facilities. The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library.

The assessment was carried out by the UKDA, The National Archives and the Estonian Business Archive, with a funding award from the Joint Information Systems Committee - under its Institutional Digital Preservation and Asset Management Programme.

ICPSR will be taking part in the RLG-NARA Digital Repository Certification project to identify the criteria repositories must meet for reliably storing, migrating, and providing access to digital collections.ICPSR has been selected to serve as a "test subject" in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) project to develop an audit checklist for certification of trusted digital repositories. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, this project builds on the work of a Task Force consisting of members from the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the U.S. National Archives and Research Administration (NARA). The Task Force is charged with developing criteria to identify digital repositories capable of reliably storing, migrating, and providing longterm access to digital collections.

RLG has released a draft of the "Audit Checklist for the Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories," which is available at http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20769. This represents the fifth generation of the RLG-NARA group’s work and provides best, current practice and thought about the organizational and technical infrastructure required for a digital repository to be considered trustworthy and capable of certification.

Leveraging the RLG-NARA audit tool, the CRL project will test audit criteria and metrics with three test subjects, including:

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of the Netherlands, which maintains the digital archive for Elsevier Science Direct Journals

IASSIST Quarterly

Special issue: A pioneer data librarianWelcome
to the special volume of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ (37):1-4, 2013).
This special issue started as exchange of ideas between Libbie
Stephenson and Margaret Adams to collect